Following a public beta trial in December 2008, Forum Nokia announced the release of the commercial version of the free Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) Plug-In for Aptana Studio, which helps developers create, edit, test, and deploy WRT widgets for Nokia S60 devices, using either Aptana Studio or Aptana Studio Pro.
"Aptana Studio is an ideal platform for us to bring these capabilities to market" said Craig Cumberland of Nokia, Head of Nokia WRT Tools and Technologies team, the team that was responsible for creating the Nokia WRT Plug-In for Aptana Studio. "Aptana's tools, combined with Nokia's WRT Plug-in for Aptana Studio, give web developers of all skill levels a great platform to go mobile and deliver widgets and web technologies to WRT capable devices."
Using the Nokia WRT Plug-In for Aptana Studio, developers can take advantage of standard web technologies – such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS – to easily create mobile applications for Nokia S60 devices.
The plug-in can be used on either PC or Mac computers, and it can be used to create WRT widgets for a variety of WRT compatible S60 devices.
“This new Nokia WRT plug-in will literally plug Forum Nokia in to the web developer community in ways that we have not been able to do before,” said Ung-Ping Tian, Web Technology Marketing Manager, Forum Nokia. “Providing development environments and tools that web developers already know and use on a regular basis has helped us to differentiate what we do from our competitors.”
During the beta period at the end of last year, close to 5,000 developers tried the plug-in and many provided valuable feedback to us about the features and functionality of this new tool.
Mobile application expert Marian Dholkawala recently wrote in a blog post: "The coolest thing about [the Nokia WRT Plug-In for Aptana Studio] is the ease with which it allows widgets to be created and tested. It not only cuts down the development time but also saves us the trouble of continuously packaging our files for testing within the S60 emulator and for debugging."
Matthew Miller, author of the “Nokia Experts” blog, tried the new plug-in for himself, and concluded: “It is pretty cool to see how you can create these widgets in just a few steps and then have something you created appear on your device. I deployed the [RSS] widget to my Nokia E71 via Bluetooth and just used the default RSS setup to create my widget. There are even some basic settings in the widget, including when to check for updates.”
Developers can also choose to use other Ajax libraries, as well; Aptana Studio makes these readily available. And for rapid testing during development, applications can be deployed to a mobile device via a Bluetooth connection.
"Nokia WRT is a harbinger of things to come in the mobile application space" said Paul Colton, CEO of Aptana. "If you want to have a large market of mobile apps that drive more consumer and business utilisation of mobile services, tapping into the creativity and entrepreneurial inclinations of millions of web developers makes lots of sense."
This is the first commercial release from Nokia’s WRT Tools team, based in Mt. View, California. Their focus is to provide tools and technologies to enable the broadest range of application creation opportunities for Nokia’s Web Run Time environment and be the leading edge of the Developer 2.0 effort.
